The present invention relates to geothermal cooling systems, and more particularly to a geothermal cooling system that has particular utility in connection with large heat generation sources such as information technology centers that include large numbers of processing devices.
Information technology centers for large organizations and heavy data processing companies usually contain a large array of electronic devices of various types, such as main frames, servers, routers, modems, personal computers and other chip containing devices. One byproduct of the use of such devices is the generation of significant amounts of heat.
In fact, a major engineering concern for all computer and information technology device designers is to find a way to appropriately dissipate the heat generated by computer equipment. For example, one viewing a computer's main processing chip will see that the chip includes a heat sink and small fan thereon to help dissipate the heat generated by the chip.
This problem of dissipating generated heat becomes magnified by several orders of magnitude when one is dealing with a multi-computer system, such as may exist at a large server farm or data processing operation used in connection with the operations of a large company, such as a large manufacturing company, or any company that generates or processes a large amount of data.
Dissipating this heat often requires a significant infrastructure investment in chillers, pipes, air conditioning systems and the like to provide cooled air or cooled water to cool the heat generation source. Additionally, this heat dissipation requires a large energy input. For example, it has been found by the Applicant that in certain applications, the energy required to operate a cooling system (e.g. air conditioner) to cool the information technology equipment may be greater than the electricity required to operate the information technology equipment itself. Therefore, further technological developments are desirable in this area.